A mysterious Bitcoin (BTC) whale is on the move, abruptly relocating tens of millions of dollars worth of the crypto king after holding the trove for over a decade.
Citing new on-chain data, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju says that the previously dormant 1,400 BTC worth over $36 million was sent to a Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) address.
“1,400 BTC dormant for 10 years moved to a P2TR address, possibly for enhanced privacy.”
P2TR is a type of transaction made possible by the Taproot soft-fork upgrade in 2021 and enables more privacy and flexibility by allowing users to spend their BTC in more complex output paths and scripts.
Since the beginning of 2023, many “ancient” Bitcoin wallets, for reasons unknown, have woken up from dormancy after many years.
In April, whale-tracking service Whale Alert spotted a wallet last active on May 9th, 2011 suddenly sending 400 BTC worth about $10.9 million to another address after nearly 12 years of dormancy.
Just days before that, the blockchain-monitoring tool BTCparser recorded two Bitcoin addresses, which accumulated their BTC stacks in 2009, moving a combined 100 Bitcoin within minutes of each other.
The older of the two addresses was created on November 22nd, 2009, and sent 50 BTC to an unknown address. The other wallet was created on November 23rd of 2009 and also sent just over 50 Bitcoin to another unknown address.
